Before erasing and selling my iPhone
, I want to backup and
extract all the data I produced with it and that is still trapped inside. This
mean photos, SMSs, voice messages, safari bookmarks, etc…

There is a nice OS X app simply called iPhone Backup Extractor
which let you get these data. Instead of
getting data directly from the iPhone, it reads its backups made by iTunes.

So first thing you have to do is to backup your phone using iTunes:

Then you can download and run the iPhone Backup Extractor app:

Here you just have to click the Read Backups button to get a list of all
backups available on your machine. Then choose your latest backup:

You’ll get a list of all installed applications on your iPhone. As we are
interested in “core” iPhone apps (SMSs, photos and so on), we’ll choose the
“iOS Files” item, then choose a place where to extract:

Then the extraction itself will take place:

You’ve just finished the essential part of the process. You now have a nice
folder structure containing all the important informations that was trapped in
your phone:

Let’s browse the file structure that was just created. You can see photos are
available as is, in the /iOS Files/Media/DCIM/XXXAPPLE/:

Most of other datas are located in the /iOS Files/Library/ folder. For
example here are voice messages:

Most, if not all, other kind of data and metadata are stored in SQLite
databases (.db files). The best GUI I found to manipulate with these files
under Mac OS X is SQLite Database Browser
. See how I can easily extract
to a CSV file all metadatas associated with my voice messages:

Finally, just in case you want to extract iPhones data from another backup than
the default backup, like from a backup of the backup (isn’t that clear?),
making a symlink is enough to trick iPhone Backup Extractor:

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